thought-machine

oil slicks on oceanic mind

268

Creativity cuts through a pattern of thought that has become habitual and reflexive.  Yesterday there was the freight train analogy; today – an oceanic oil slick comes to mind.

Habitual patterns of thought are like oil slicks on the surface of oceanic mind.

Oil slicks can be exquisitely patterned.  The patterns are complex and colorful; they can rearrange themselves in endless variations.  Attractive and seductive – yet how lethal when spread over the living, breathing, ecosystem of an earth ocean!

Mental oil slicks operate in the same suffocating manner.  They contain only one component – the output of the conditioned memory machine.

And in the manner of an earthly ocean, when oceanic mind stirs up a storm (with a few fearless questions), crashing waves and spray break up the oil slick.

Even if the break is only temporary, Creation will have had a say.

Creativity will have surfaced.

~

wouldn’t you want to know?

185

A dear friend calls – a woman who has spent her life on the spiritual path, ceaselessly seeking and serving, and now in her 8th decade.  The power of evil in the world, she says, is too much for her.  She no longer believes in the power of goodness.  She’s contemplating a premature departure.

I sit.  An echo arrives.  It’s not exactly comforting.  It’s an invitation:

Beloved, brave Beingness –

Leave if you wish, but don’t kid yourself that you’ll leave evil behind.

The concepts of evil and its partner, goodness, are inextricably intertwined.  And – they exist only in the thought-system of a perceiver.

Wouldn’t it be a better idea to check out for yourself – before it’s too late – who or what this perceiver is?  Perhaps its information isn’t the full story.  Perhaps it’s making up a story that’s not true.  Wouldn’t you want to know?

Find that perceiver.  Track it to its burrow, feel its terror at being exposed, notice its valid and invalid functions.

Finding, tracking, feeling, noticing … who or what does any of this?  Can it be observed and examined?

It’s possible only if you conceptualize it – turn it into an object to be observed.

But then the hunt begins again, and again … for some-thing that’s just another fragment of the thought-system.

Stop!

What’s left when the mind’s merry-go-round stops?

When the giddiness subsides into stillness?

Beloved! 
~

clarity comes effortlessly

182

Looking for clarity?
Try turning off the thought machine.
Clarity comes effortlessly when mind
stops its default dot-connecting.

It’s like a rio abajo rio – 
a field of intelligence that flows
beneath the river of intellect
and the streams of space and time.

Stop thinking; it bubbles up.

Trouble is, ‘you’ can’t stop thinking
for ‘you’ are the thinking process!

What to do?

Nothing, there’s no way out.
The discovery of this stops thought in its tracks.

Like Grace, all that’s needed for clarity
is space.

~